Connectivity between electrical and electromechanical components (e.g., circuit packages, fuse panels, and circuit boards) can be accomplished by way of a wiring harness. A wiring harness generally refers to a collection (e.g., bundle) of one or more wires coupled together. One example of a wiring harness is a bundle of separately insulated wires that couple an automobile dashboard with the control electronics for the automobile's engine. Another example is a bundle of wires that couple an airplane cockpit to the wing assembly, engines, tail assembly, and landing gear.
Wiring harness diagrams can reduce a potentially complicated collection of wires to a readable map of components and connections. Wiring harnesses can be represented using wiring harness diagrams, which can include many physical details of the wires, couplings, and components of a particular wiring harness. Software tools, such as the Capital® Harness Systems™ (CHS) product suite by Mentor Graphics Corporation, allow a user to design, analyze, engineer, and produce wiring harnesses for various types of electrical interconnect systems.
Previous wiring harness design tools known to the inventors, however, have been limited in various aspects. For example, a user login would only allow one designer at a time to work on (e.g., edit) his or her wiring harness design(s), effectively locking out other users from working on their own wiring harness designs. If another designer wanted to edit his or her wiring harness design(s), he or she would need to wait until the first user logged out and then login separately in a different session.
Also, previous systems provided access to a designer on a workspace basis, as opposed to a wiring harness design basis. Since a workspace often has multiple harness designs each assigned to different users, this arrangement meant that users may have had access to one or more wiring harness designs that were not meant to be made available to them for editing.
Thus, there exists a need for improved electronic wiring harness design tools and methods.